Ken Burns' Vietnam

[James DiEugenio]

This is how it happened.

Kennedy was very discouraged that in the November 1961 two week debate, he was the only one arguing against inserting  combat troops.  And this was the ninth time the subject came up that year, and each time he was the guy saying no.  In this particular debate, McNamara actually proposed sending in well over 8 divisions, 200,000 men. He was worse than Bundy, who proposed sending in 26,000.

Well, Kennedy then decided that he had to bring in someone he could trust to write him a report the opposite of what Rostow was proposing.  So he exiles Rostow to the State Department policy planning office and be talks to his old mentor JK Galbraith.  He tells him to go to Saigon and write a report.  Of course, JFK knew what he would say.  He recommended distancing from the Diem regime, which he thought was doomed.

So the next time Galbraith was in town, he told him to bring his report to McNamara and tell him that the president wants him to read it.  This was in April of 1962.  From that point on, Kennedy now had a point man on the withdrawal plan.  But to imply this was McNamara's idea is ridiculous since he was a hawk in November. We also have about five witnesses who say that McNamara was tasked with the withdrawal plan by Kennedy.  This includes, HIlsman, McNaughton, GIlpatric, Galbraith and Bundy.

It was Kennedy's withdrawal plan and only his.  McNamara was just the instrument for Kennedy's wishes. Another example of that would be the Taylor/McNamara trip report of October 1963. Kennedy decided he was not going to trust Taylor screwing up everything he had been working on for a year and half.  So when those two  went to Saigon, he had Bobby Kennedy bring Krulak and Prouty into the White House to write the Taylor/McNamara  report for them.  RFK dictated it at the direction of the president. Once it was done, RFK had it shipped out to Hawaii in a bound format..  So that it could not be changed. It was delivered to those two in Honolulu and they read it coming back into Washington.  And that was the basis for NSAM 263.  

Which, by the way had already been enacted. In May of that year at the SecDef conference in Hawaii McNamara had ordered all the divisions and agencies in Vietnam to report with withdrawal plans in hand. When McNamara read them he turned around and said:  Its too slow.  Speed it up.  He said that because he and Kennedy thought that  Saigon might fall before it was completed.  Which is why Kennedy had ordered an evacuation plan for the city and got it back in November.

The evidence for this is simply overwhelming today. If Burns ignored it its not because it was not there or no one told him about it.

All of Kennedy's year and half of work was undone in three months by LBJ.  In March of 1964 NSAM 288 ordered battle plans for the Pentagon in Vietnam.  Something Kennedy deliberately avoided and would not countenance in his presence.

That is the truth.  Halberstam's book is one long lie.

Edited September 19, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Martin Blank]

20 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

I took it as it was the administrations idea, I. E. JFK's.  Which, as you mention Dr. Newman, I think his book supports.  Go back to NSAM 111 and the Thanksgiving Day massacre of 61 and it's aftermath of firing Dulles/Cabbell/Bissell.  JFK showed his hand at that time by refusing to surrender to their demands for combat troops on the ground in Vietnam.  He continued this policy after his reorganization until his death.  He stated his intent to withdraw advisors by the end of 63 to more than one privately if I remember correctly. 

that firing had nothing to do with vietnam.

In 1968, (Ret.) General James M. Gavin stated:

 There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for 15 years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view.

Paul B. Fay, undersecretary of the Navy under JFK, stated:

   If John Kennedy had lived, our military involvement in Vietnam would have been over by the end of 1964.

To Larry Newman, Kennedy said:

  “The first thing I do when I’m re-elected, I’m going to get the Americans   out of Vietnam. Exactly how I’m going to do it, right now, I don’t know.”

  JFK also advised Robert McNamara: “We are not going to have men ground up in this fashion, this far away     from home. I’m going to get these guys out because we’re not going to find ourselves in a war it is impossible to win.

     In 1963 Kennedy remarked to his aide Kenneth O’Donnell:

      In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a communist appeaser, but now I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe  McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m re-elected. So we  had better make damned sure I’m re-elected.

            Senator Wayne Morse told the Boston Globe in 1973:

There’s a weak defense of John Kennedy. He’d seen the error of his ways. I’m satisfied if he’d lived another year we’d have been out of Vietnam. Ten days before his assassination, I went down to the White House and handed     him his education bills, which I was handling on the Senate floor. I’d been making two to five speeches a week against Kennedy on Vietnam. . . .I’d gone into President Kennedy’s office to discuss education bills, but he said, ‘Wayne, I want you to know you’re absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. Keep this in mind. I’m in the midst of an intensive study which substantiates your position on Vietnam.’

The study which Kennedy alluded to was made known “through the Ellsberg Papers as the McNamara Study.” Volume 8 of this study details, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Kennedy’s plans to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War.”

[James DiEugenio]

Its actually called Phased Withdrawal 1963-64.

And Halberstam ignored it in his book.

 

Nice one Martin.

[Ron Bulman]

So Prouty and Krulak wrote the Taylor/McNamara report For JFK?  Wow. 

Considering their later implications of Lansdale in Dealy Plaza I'm ...lost...    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

so Prouty

[Ron Bulman]

2 hours ago, Martin Blank said:

W

Where is the layer of  truth that is actually the truth?

Chances are you won't hear anything abut NSAM 273 in the next installment either. that just might damage the conventional wisdom about how LBJ blundered into the the war when he and his backers actually had sought the war.

I am truly disappointed and plan to let Burns know what his crime is. No excuses. For this he should get an F

Your right Sir, the Gulf of Tonkin, 'just get me elected, 'I'll give you your Damn War'" (LBJ).

[James DiEugenio]

By the way, if you recall, when Stone's film came out in 1991, Prouty, Newman and Oliver took a beating over this issue from the MSM, that is the Washington Post, NY Times, Newsweek etc.

They all blasted the withdrawal thesis at every turn.

But then, in 1997, the ARRB declassified the records of McNamara's May 1963 Sec Def conference in Hawaii.  That evidence was so powerful that even the NY Times changed its tune and had  a headline with the banner, "Kennedy had Plan to end the Vietnam War."

Did they apologize to those three men named above?  Nope. Did they thank them.  Nope.  Its like all that trashing did not happen.

If Burns is ignoring all of this then I think he remembers what happened to them.  Which is OK for career advancement.  Its not OK for the cause of historical truth.

Edited September 19, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[David Andrews]

Ron, if lost, remember that Prouty cited Lansdale as Allen Dulles' s protege, noting that Dulles's backing got Curtis LeMay to promote Lansdale to Air Force general.  However Lansdale may have regarded Kennedy, it's always been "Dance with the one(s) what brung ya."  Kennedy didn't give EGL the Vietnam ambassadorship, and Mongoose foundered under uncertain policy control.  Lansdale's zeal for a Castro assassination couldn't have helped in the last days of Mongoose.  Lansdale may even have been shunted aside by JFK and RFK as a part of the Dulles-LeMay gang. 

How did LeMay, two years older than Lansdale, hang on at JSOC while Lansdale was retired from USAF, if not by power of reputation?  Kennedy should have packed off LeMay with Lemnitzer, but the PR angle on losing two seasoned Chiefs would have been bad.  It might have happened had Kennedy won in 1964.

Edited September 19, 2017 by David Andrews

[Joe Bauer]

 

Looking back, it was clearly the poorest kids from our middle California area that made up the huge majority of ones that couldn't get out of the Viet Nam war draft or went in the military voluntarily because they knew they couldn't get deferments - for post secondary schooling or otherwise.

Conversely, almost every better off kid I knew in school never had to go into the military, especially during Viet Nam times...for various reasons, most of which seemed very vague to me. But I felt back then and still to this day that the Viet Nam war was a blatant exercise in economic discrimination in this way. Just another of it's tragic flaws.

Edited September 23, 2017 by Joe Bauer

[Paul Brancato]

Joseph McBride has posted on Facebook his response to Ken Burns. He's not happy about painting JFK as just another Cold Warrior. Clearly Burns has not read Newman, or if he has he dismisses it, preferring public statements by our leaders rather than their behind the scenes actions and words. It's another rewrite of history. I agree that the footage is interesting to watch. 

[Jeff Carter]

Here's another critical viewer, concerned over Burns' downplaying (or ignorance) over the crucial misrepresentation of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/19/getting-the-gulf-of-tonkin-wrong-are-ken-burns-and-lynn-novick-telling-stories-about-the-central-events-used-to-legitimize-the-us-attack-against-vietnam/

A useful distinction is made - namely Burns sees himself as a storyteller not a historian - but this program is being presented as a history.

Re: Lansdale - his career after 1963 is tracked in Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's book Gold Warriors. Lansdale joined other CIA veterans in creating off-the-books ventures, and was a founding member of what would become known as The Enterprise, exposed during Iran-Contra.

[Roger DeLaria]

Speaking of Iran-Contra, I believe Oliver North modeled himself after Lansdale, and called himself, "Lansdalian".

I don't remember the years, but didn't Lansdale manage to move 1 million+ vietnamese from the north to the south, to create a whole bunch of chaos? I don't suppose the program has mentioned any of that.

[Douglas Caddy]

From Kris Millegan’s article: Going through my father's papers after his death in 1990, I found an itinerary for the 1956 trip and noticed that he had traveled to Chang Mai, Thailand. At that time I was very interested in the history of Chang Mai, because of the role the city has played in the opium/heroin trade. I had been told that the city had grown to a million people from a very small town in the 1950s, and was looking for information. Now, I could simply ask my mother.

So the next time I visited my Mother, I asked her about Chang Mai. She said that, “Yes, it was a small village. The biggest thing in town was the church.” She said she had some pictures in a book up on her bookshelf. I reached up to get the photograph album, and mom made a little aside, “That's when I stopped believing everything I read in the newspaper.”

That pricked up my ears, because I had asked my mother questions before, and she always just brushed them aside, saying she didn't know anything. So, I asked my mom, what did she mean? She said that in 1956 they had been in Vietnam before going to Thailand, and while in Thailand the newspaper reported on a battle in Viet Nam, right where they had been. She said, “There was no battle, we were having a picnic.” I turned back the pages of her photo book from Chang Mai, and there were pictures of my parents, Ed Lansdale and a bunch of soldiers. They were obviously having a picnic.

I borrowed the photo book and photocopied the page. One was a picture of my mother where she was so radiant and vivacious that it was later used during her memorial. Also in that picture you can see Ed Lansdale and others sitting around having a good time – a picnic. The interesting item, is what my mother had written in the margin next to the picture: “Eudora (my mother's name) out from Saigon with Col. Lansdale and North Vietnamese Military leaders.”

North Vietnamese Military leaders? Having a picnic?

http://watergateexposed.com/articles-menu/179-allegations-regarding-qbutchq-merritt-watergate-intelligence-agencies-and-qcrimson-rose-q-vol-vi.html

[James DiEugenio]

The air attacks against North Vietnam were retaliation over the Gulf of Tonkin incident?

I hope that is not what he says.  If it is, and the mischaracterization of JFK is also accurate, then this is simply a rewrite of the real facts and an apologia for a war we should never have been involved in.

The reality is this:

The whole Gulf of Tonkin episode traces directly back to the alterations made by LBJ to NSAM 273.  He made it possible to do those patrols with American ships.  They could not have been done without them since Saigon had no navy to speak of.  Then, the missions were designed as provocations with a counter intelligence intent.  This was later admitted to by both McGeorge Bundy and Mike Forrestal of the NSC.  The idea was a to have the South Vietnamese makeshift boats violate territorial waters, provoke a counter attack, and gather info through NSA equipment on board the American ships.   Except, as more than one author has shown, it ended up that the actual American ships themselves violated territorial waters also. So therefore, Hanoi was justified in trying to get them out.

The "retaliation" idea is simply ridiculous.  The damage to American ships was one bullet through one hull. That was it. And the second so called attack did not happen. In reaction to this one bullet, LBJ ordered 94 sorties to attack North Vietnam. He then announced this attack in advance so he could get on prime time TV.  This gave Hanoi a warning, so their anti aircraft batteries knocked down three planes.

But that is not the worst of it.  The worst of it is this:  LBJ designed those air attacks back in March of 1964 with NSAM 288.  At that time he said that they would wait for a so called "casus belli" to attack the north.  And he reportedly carried around a rough draft of the Tonkin Gulf resolution in his jacket pocket months before it happened. Well, this was the casus belli. What made it easy was that Nixon and Goldwater were urging it all on.  After Tonkin, LBJ put together a team in the White House to arrange a giant air war, to lobby congress, and time it all for his re election.  He could not do it before, because he had to lie his head off during the campaign and make it look like Goldwater was the hawk.  You know all that crap about "We seek no wider war."  The original plan was to unleash Rolling Thunder in February of 1965.  It actually began on March 2nd, they missed it by one month.

But that was only step one.  Once you created this giant air armada, you had to have troops there to protect against sabotage.  So a week later, LBJ landed the first Marine detachment of about 5,000 men at Da Nang. With tanks, both conventional and flame throwing. (Question: Tanks for defense in a guerrilla war?) And this was really the beginning of the nightmare.  With this, Kennedy's embargo against any American combat troops or any high level Pentagon officers running American operations in theater was now down the drain.

Its clear in reading Fred Logevall's book Choosing War, and Edwin Moise's book Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War that this was all planned out well in advance by LBJ.  He himself admitted in a taped meeting with McNamara in 1964 how he bit his tongue when Kennedy and McNamara outlined their withdrawal plan in front of him.  While he was recommending combat troops in theater in 1961!  Johnson did not have any idea about what JFK's foreign policy really was about.  Johnson was a Cold Warrior, plain and simple, and Kennedy was not.  To Kennedy, South Vietnam did not constitute a part of our vital interests.  We could help them and advise them, but it was not worth us fighting their war for them. And he said this explicitly to Schlesinger. He then added, if we did that, we would end up like France and we would lose like France did.  LBJ did look at it as a vital national security interest and that is why he did what he did. It is that easy to understand, if you have the facts and don't censor them.

 I do not believe that Burns is ignorant of Logevall or Moise. This is beginning to look like the whole Reagan  "noble cause" spin on Vietnam.  Is Burns getting Koch money on this?

Edited September 20, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Martin Blank]

i'm pretty sure the name koch listed with supporters

in the matter of what a coincidence: Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was also the proud papa of one Jim Morrison, late of the Doors. Cue up: "The End" 

Here the two of them are sharing a moment on the bridge of the U.S.S carrier Bon Homme Richard in 1964. Wowzers, life is sure strange.

Gonna break on through to the other side!

I guess they can't count to 273 why would i think they could if they couldn't do 263?

Edited September 20, 2017 by Martin Blank

[Ron Bulman]

It all carry's forward to today.  This Lady knows a little bit about the Koch's techniques.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0307947904/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505883206&sr=1-1&keywords=dark+money+jane+mayer+paperback

It took a lot of oil to fuel the helicopters, and for the people who built them to get from home to work and back home.

Edited September 20, 2017 by Ron Bulman